Sunday, May 06, 2007

Kodak Picture Machine And Juliet - A Minimalist Modern Tragedy

A Proposed Miniseries

ONE

JULIET:(In voiceover, as images flick by on the screen of her and Kodak Picture Machine at university, drinking together at parties, etc) We were young, we were passionate - perhaps we were too hasty. But I felt myself drawn to Kodak Picture Machine from very early on...

(Scene change: Juliet's house. The Rolling Stones are playing in the background, and Juliet and Kodak Picture Machine are sitting on Juliet's couch, kissing passionately)

JULIET: Oh Kodak Picture Machine! I don't think I've ever felt this way about a man before! But do you think we're taking things a litte too fast?

(Each time he repeats this phrase, another photograph of him and Juliet sitting together at the beach clicks into the box at his bottom. A camera close up on this box reveals that he must have done this hundreds of times).

So you don't just crave being insulted, you crave being insulted in a multi-lingual manner- a very egotistical, demanding sort of masochistic hedonism! I suppose I could whip something up in Latin, if you like, but Pig Latin, as the parlance of the school yard, is probably more appropriate.

Oi, Tim, I didn't say you could insult me back! But alright, Latin coming up later, since you didn't ask nicely!

Here's a bit of English for you:

Dearest Timt,

You are the dung in the gutter of a plague-stricken street. You are the greenest globule of typhlitic phlegm ever produced. You are a toe-rag clinging, in leach-like manner, to the rotting foot of a gangrenous leg. When the pig spat at the goat and the spittle ran down the goat's hind quarters to settle in the soil, what germinated was you.

That said, my favourite insults are the simple ones, in particular bastard and fascist. Fascist and bastard together are just magic! You can add another F word for extra fireworks, but it really doesn't need it.

"In Paragon we met Mrs Foley & Mrs Dowdeswell with her yellow shawl airing out—& at the bottom of Kinsdown Hill we met a Gentleman in a Buggy, who on minute examination turned out to be Dr Hall—& Dr Hall in such very deep mourning that either his Mother, his Wife, or himself must be dead." - Letters again.

Then again, I don't have a Mulberry tree or a Buggy, and am not sure anyone else here does either, so I'm not they may not be applicable.

Backhanded insults are the insults of choice in my family, but one needs a subject of polite conversation with which to engage first. Only then can you slip in the subtle insult at the opportune moment. I'm very fond of the hammer in the velvet glove.

Perhaps we should start talking about something like scones, then the insults will flow of their own accord! Maybe all the participants in the insult exchange (someone join us, please!), could list the things they are particularly self-conscious about first.

Actually, the best insult of my childhood was when K and I learnt how to say "Can you tell me the way to the tourist centre?" in French. We would shout it at my younger sister and she would be driven wild with rage, as she was sure we were saying something very complex and horrible.

He's half right politically and also he's half right because he's a halfwit or a nitwit? The words are interesting (just to stray a bit), aren't they? A halfwit is a quantity of wit which seems to cancel itself out, but a nitwit is a kind of wit which isn't wit. And then there's twit... Ah, where's my teapot?

I hadn't thought about the half-wit angle. I thought it was a way for Hitchens to say 'He's a wit, but he doesn't think'. See what I mean, though? It's the kind of druinken insult that is funny, but doesn't quite make sense when you shine the cold, hard light of sobriety upon it.

Random O'Rourke insult by way of comparison: "Industrialization came to England but has since left." - P J O'Rourke.

Hmmmm. I thought of the halfwit angle straight away, so it made sense to me. I haven't read any O'Rourke. Are you a Wodehouse type too?

A "druinken" insult sounds like a novel bit of fun- like a dunking machine at a German country fair? The insult that's like a splash of cold water- which means it stops making sense in the second after you recover from the devastation of the initial blow.

I'm drinking "gunpowder green tea". Some might say it tastes like gunpowder, but it hits the spot rather nicely, I think.

At the encouragement of Herr Nottlesby, I have been meaning to read some Wodehouse.

I had a recent encounter with drunken humour on the tram, with my umbrella. A tipsy chap and his parade stumbled onto the tram - their mission, I think, was to find a kebab shop at the end of Lygon Street - and when he saw my umbrella, he exclaimed:

"Ah! An electric umbrella!"

I replied with words to the effect, 'What are you talking about? There is no such thing as an electric umbrella, o drunken chap!'

He then went off on a rambling semantic discourse concluding that my umbrella had a button, and therefore it must be electric.

He then had many happy minutes/hours (much the same to a drunkard) opening and closing the umbrella. (I made it clear to him that the bad luck would be on him before hand it over to him).

My sister (the twin) loves Wodehouse. I've been meaning to read some for years at her urging.

Am I unlucky or do you just have a special species of Melbourne drunk? Although it does sound like that chap might have been indulging in something else too... All the drunks I see around are the aggressive, harrassing-women sort. Good on you for entertaining him!

While I would love for Melbourne to be able to claim a monopoly on eloquent drunks, I can't in all justice argue that that is the case. I'm sure that Sydney has more than its fair share of stylish sots. Lenny Lower, for instance.

Well, I did read in the paper today that Melbourne is bidding to be the second UNESCO city of literature. I didn't know there was such a thing, but apparently Edinburgh is the first one. I imagine you'll have to have drunken eloquence classes at Melbourne Uni, if the bid is successful. Perhaps there can even be a V.C.E subject!

(By a startling coincidence, I've had one too many glasses of red wine tonight, but, since I'm a reformed teetotaller, that's probably about, oh, two or so!).

There's no telling how much of the blogosphere we owe to alcomahol! Here is where I saw the news of Melbourne's literary ambitions heralded. Naturally the first step is a logo. I don't know though. There's a certain cultural anxiety in having to apply for such a title. I don't imagine Paris or Dublin or New York or London really need UNESCO to certify their literary value.

I was looking for brandy, but the brandy cupboard was bare. I don't like beer and it took me a long time to determine which wines wouldn't give me an almost instantaneous headache. I also, oddly, found the idea of being drunk very unappealing.

You're a very funny chap, but I have to say that I'm not a fan of that last joke.

Oh, it was a joke? Damn, that's the trouble with word play - sometimes you do it and you don't even know about it. Actually, when the word verification didn't let me in I couldn't let it slip by so I added that sentence as clarification not realising it had a second meaning.

I have to say that I was very surprised that you would say something like that, so it's good to know that it was entirely unintentional. I've just had to see and listen to so much misogyny lately and I was thinking "Oh no! Not the funny, charming blogger too!".

I'd have to say I'm ambivalent about the kind of 'cultural focus' Anne Saunders is extolling in that kind of article. I don't mind having Melbourne be a UNESCO city of literature; the concept is not much different to having all these other ridiculous festivals of culture.

It's all pretty tokenistic - apparently Melbournians have just devoted a month to comedy, and pretty soon it will be another month to film, and after that another one and a half months to arts and literature. The most annoying aspect of it is putting up with all the fame-whoring of The Age newspaper, which is a major sponsor, and some of the intellectual zombies who frequent these events.

Anyway, London and Paris and New York and probably Dublin, too, have all bid for the Olympic Games, the biggest token-extravaganza of them all!

For me one of the most revealing paragraphs is this one, nicely positioned after the usual extolling of the "creative class":

As a committed Sydneysider I found it galling that Melbourne is doing all this so well. Every arts venue has cafes or bars where the quality - and the price - of the food (and the service!) are way ahead of comparable places here.

There's the ludicrous idea of the "committed Sydneysider" (is Sydney now comparable to a lover or a child?), but, once you get past that, you find the rub. It's not arts so much as lifestyle. The arts are a nice little accompaniment, but not really the main dish. That's what's so frustrating about this sort of stuff- the shallowness of it. The packaging supercedes the thing it's supposed to be packaging because packaging is easier. Maybe I just hate "hipness"!

In Melbourne what you do have is a really excellent State Library and a public art gallery with a hell of a lot more money than usual. These are things to be grateful for. Hopefully this centre for Books and Ideas will have some good public programs and will spend at least as much on those as has (no doubt) been spent on the logo.

It's interesting though, isn't it? What I find galling is the fact that most of Sydney has to spend hours on our substandard and exorbitantly expensive public transport system to get to these cultural hubs in the first place. The harbour is nice and all that, but real physical advantage, in my book, is a crazy little thing called urban planning.

Being a typist, I have a whole tonne of examples where this happens! A workmate misheard the phrase 'Fair whack of the trouble' and thought it was 'Fair whack of the truffle', a variation of the phrase 'Fair suck of the saveloy'.

The ABC have a doozy on their website; they were talking about the flooding of country town Adanimaby during the Snowy Mountains Scheme. They played some footage of an old news report where the broadcaster read:

And these are the men that are drowning Adinimaby

The ABC typist misheard this, and wrote:

And these are the men that are drowning admirably

As Dylan Thomas should have wrote,

'The hand that typed the transcript drowned a city...

Oh, and this wasn't one of our own mistakes, but an ALP pollie recently talked about the 'parachuting' of celebrity candidates into a safe seat, and said:

I just don't think someone like a Peter Garrett or, you know, God, any other number of celebrities you can think of....

Yeah, you know, God. Old chap, has a beard, votes for the Australian Labor Party and hands out how to vote cards at the local school come election time...

Being a phone whore I do quite a lot of terrible verbal slips and sometimes typing ones - I once accidentally wrote 'bitch centre' for 'birth centre'. I can only assume that some midwife ticked me off.

I also have this terrible fear that I will slip up with people's names...like Hunt - that one really worries me given how I swear and my general, er, fondness, for the medical industry. Some names are fucking minefields.